JAB–Journal of Artists' Books

JAB24: Special Issue on the Intersections of Experimental Literature & Artists' Books, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kyle Schlesinger.

Fall 2008, 48 pages, offset printed on the Heidelberg GTO by BF at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College Chicago.

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From the Introduction by Craig Dworkin and Kyle Schlesinger–

This special issue of the Journal of Artists' Books focuses on a series of fundamental relationships–form and content; structure and material; art and literature; the visual and the verbal; seeing and reading–and the astonishing occasions when those relationships intersect, blur, reverse, cancel, or come under erasure to generate a third element. One name for that dialectical third element has been the "artist's book." At other times, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, "experimental literature" has been pressed into service to do similar duty (one might also think of other more local terms, including the ungainly compounds "intermedia," "metatextual," and "self reflexive"). As the rhetorical histories of the labels "artist's book" and "experimental literature" have developed and defined–evolving into genres of their own along different branches with shared ancestors–they seem now to have separated to the point where one can think of them as distinct categories, with all the potential for interaction and competition, including healthy sibling rivalries and patterns of productive interference.

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Table of Contents

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• Editor's Note

– Brad Freeman

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• JAB24: Special Issue on the Intersections of Experimental Literature and Artists' Books

– Edited by Craig Dworkin and Kyle Shlesinger

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• Of "Men and Mutations" the Art of Reproduction in Flatland

– Susan Vanderborg

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• Highway 24 Revisited: Reeling Between The Road and Artists' Books From Toledo to Kansas City

– Chris Burnett and Tate Shaw

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• Off the Road

– Alastair Johnston

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• Chapbook Presses

A Note on Atticus/Finch

– David Pavelich

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Poet as Maker

– Elisabeth Long

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• Handmade-o-Meter

– Daniel Mellis

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• • • • •

from "Of 'Men and Mutations' The Art of Reproduction in Flatland"

by Susan Vanderborg

As reviewers of VAS: An Opera in Flatland have amply noted, this collaborative novel by author Steve Tomasula and graphic artist Stephen Farrell is all about types of reproduction, whether in the lavish reproduction of found texts, the diverse typographic formats for its segments, the reworking of Edwin A. Abbott’s geometric novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), or the plot question of sexual reproduction, since the protagonist is thinking about a vasectomy. But what, specifically, is the nature of that relation between physical and textual reproduction here? Is the bulk of the book—all 370 pages of poetically arranged narration, medical excerpts, and graphics—a compensation for the surgical cut the hero fears, or the loss of natural procreativity that would horrify his mother-in-law? Or is its artistry a complicit reflection of the modifications we have sought in both the past and the present of our own bodies? Ultimately, this visual novel acknowledges that our physiology is always overwritten by cultural histories, but it argues that, to our chagrin and sometimes our benefit, we rarely copy those texts perfectly or even redact the same fragments. VAS focuses on the ambiguities, omissions, and fallacies in our conflicting definitions of human identity, records that not only expose their sources’ biases but can occasionally offer more chances for a “revisionist history” of bodies and communities than their authors had ever intended. VAS’s notes on these imperfect texts invite us to reexamine the limits of our own revisionary agency as interpreters and transmitters of evolutionary records.

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• • • • •

Editor's Note, Brad Freeman

The genesis for the content of JAB24 grew directly out of a conversation at the Center for Book and Paper Arts in the spring of 2007 among Brandon Graham, Clif Meador, and myself about The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djin by Don Barthelme. In fact, I had just walked into Clif's office where he and Brandon were talking and I exclaimed that this intersection between literature and artists' books might be a worthy subject for JAB to explore and then rushed off immediately to call Johanna Drucker to ask her if she could edit the issue. She demurred due to previous engagements, but suggested Craig Dworkin and Kyle Shlesinger who enthusiastically agreed to the assignment.

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Order – click here.

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